


Crystal's Story - With Artwork!

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves (condensed) [7]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alcoholism, Angst, Art, Backstory, Canon Compliant, Deathbed Scans, Digital Art, Fanart, Fix-It, Gen, Illustration, Mars, Original Character of Color, Original Female Character - Freeform, POV Character of Color, POV Female Character, Parental Death, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psi Corps, Sacrifice, Suicide, Terrorism, Violence, Worldbuilding, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-04-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:21:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,742
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23483755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: Crystal hesitated.  She thought about her mother.Oh my God, I’m going to end up like my mother.There was no escape.  She was on a spaceship.  She had nowhere to run.“This is it,” the cop said forcefully, disdainfully.  “What’s wrong with you?  Do you support the underground?”“No!  Of course not!”“Then you gonna help us or not?”It wasn’t a real choice.This work is a selection from theBehind the Glovesproject, with all the chapters (and art!) of this work together in one place.
Relationships: Family Relationships
Series: Behind the Gloves (condensed) [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1687384
Kudos: 1





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Artwork commissioned from [Ramon Puasa Jr.](https://www.deviantart.com/monpuasajr) and [Kira L. Nguyen](https://www.deviantart.com/kiralng).

2259.

A cup of coffee saved Crystal’s life.

On the company transport from Mars, waiting for the jump back to Earth, she had stepped out of the conference room to get something to drink. She’d picked up her cup and turned to leave when something exploded.

The ship rocked, the lights went out, alarms blared, and the hot coffee spilled over the floor and down the front of Crystal’s suit. She screamed, lost her balance and fell to the floor.

People ran through the corridor, past the break room, shouting orders to each other.

“Fire! Fire in the conference room!”

Company security rushed to put it out, their boots thudding as they ran. Crystal huddled in the back corner against the wall, heart beating wildly in her chest. It took all her strength to get her mental walls back up in place. She couldn’t be of much help to anyone else if she didn’t look after herself first.

The ship filled with panic and smoke. Through the fear and screams and pain, she could barely feel herself think at all.

“This is the captain speaking,” a male voice boomed over the intercom. “We have an emergency. Please remain calm and alert security personnel if you or someone near you is injured, and do not move about the ship unless absolutely necessary.”

Outside the door to the break room, the shouting continued, unaffected by the captain’s words.

Alone, and uninjured, Crystal sat quietly, trying to block out the panic all around her. She was only partially successful. Every minute felt like an hour. She looked at the grey walls, at her black gloves, at the greenish tiles on the floor, at the company logo on the coffee cup, at the stain down the front of her shirt. She thought about home, about her cadre, about her husband, about her young son.

“This is the captain again. The fire in the conference room has been extinguished. I repeat, all fires have been extinguished and the situation is under control. Police and medical personnel have been notified and are on their way.”

With concentration, Crystal sorted through the cacophony in her mind.

She listened.

A bomb had gone off. The fire was out, but there were bodies everywhere – blood, gore, charred flesh. She saw the images through the eyes and minds of the witnesses, and felt waves of nausea, horror, shock. Her boss was dead. The other company telepaths were dead. Everyone who had been in the conference room was dead.

She sat, her back to the wall, crying, and praying for a miracle.

*****

_In vids, normals are always right._

_[Beta Erani III](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10365603/chapters/22900242), an Earth-like colony deep in space. A man staggers back to town, on the verge of death, and collapses in the street. A dashing young prospector named Colby Cross brings him a flask of water. The villager tells Cross that a band of outlaws is hiding out in the mine, preparing a raid on Cross’ town. With great difficulty, the villager tells Cross that he overheard their plans, but the outlaws shot him and left him for dead._

_Cross asks the man for more information, but he passes out, cold. “Someone fetch Mariska!” he shouts to his friends. Mariska comes running. She is the only telepath in town, and she always does whatever the normals ask of her._

_“Quick!” orders Cross. “Please Mariska, this man is dying. You have to scan him so we can stop the outlaws!”_

_After some urging, she complies. The man dies in her arms. Shaking, she tells Cross and his friends everything they need to know._

_They stop the attack._

_Justice always prevails._

_Mariska disappears, to wherever it is she goes until they need her again._

*****

Crystal sat quietly on the floor. Normal police and paramedics arrived on the scene. According to another of the captain’s booming announcements, the company was investigating the attack as a possible act of terror.

Martian history, Crystal knew, had always been one of war, starting with the very first civilian colony, destroyed a mere eight years after its founding in a sneak attack by Earth Isolationist terrorists. Since the beginning of the century, all of the violence on the red planet had been home-grown.

She thought of the [Colby Cross](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10365603/chapters/22900242) vids. Mars wasn’t a distant colony like the fictional Beta Erani III, but it was its own “wild west.”

And now these same outlaws had bombed her ship.

She waited quietly as the police began to investigate the attack, and as medics triaged the victims, tallying up the living, the injured, the dying, the dead.

One of the police officers found Crystal.

“Hey, I found a telepath!” he barked.

Crystal didn’t move. He was a big, burly man, young, strong, with light brown skin and a mind that felt like polished steel.

“You injured?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Get up, I have a job for you.”

Crystal stood, obediently, feeling she had no choice. She was the only telepath left. She had become Mariska.

“We think the ship was targeted by terrorists,” the cop was saying, as they made their way past injured people and busy medics, through screams and pain, “but we don’t know the details. All the other telepaths are dead, blown apart – we didn’t think any made it through alive.”

She nodded. She didn’t tell him that she already knew – better than he did. Only her shaky mental shields, and the psychological boundaries afforded by her gloves, separated her from the chaos.

The cop was emotionless as he spoke, matter-of-fact. Like most normal cops he was unshakeable, able to respond to highly emotional situations, even crises, with all the warmth of a duracrete wall. He didn’t need mental shields – little from the outside got through into his mind, anyway.

“The bomb went off in the conference room,” the cop continued. “The Executive Vice President happened to be meeting with his telepaths when it exploded.”

“His” telepaths? Crystal wondered. Did she belong to him? She worked for the company – she didn’t belong to the executives like a pet.

“I went to get a cup of coffee,” she told him.

“Ah, so that’s why you were in there. Well, it’s a good thing you drink coffee, Ms…?”

“Bonville.”

“You French?”

“On my mom’s side. My father is Japanese.”

“Huh, that’s right, you people take your moms' names.”

She nodded. “It’s been customary in the Corps for generations. Since before the Corps, in fact.”

Crystal tried not to look at the bleeding passengers as she passed them, and focused instead on the feel of the silk lining of her gloves against her skin. She had boundaries, she reminded herself. She was safe.

They stopped in front of an injured man, unconscious on the floor. He was young, maybe in his late twenties, not much older than Crystal. His clothes were torn or burned away, revealing gashes and charred flesh. A trickle of blood streaked across his face, down his cheek, onto the floor. His breath came in short, uneasy gasps. His eyes were closed.

“This guy,” the cop said, pointing. “He’s not on the manifest. He’s got no identicard. We think he’s a stowaway, and that he had something to do with the attack.”

Crystal didn’t like where this was headed. “Then we’d better get him stabilized and to a hospital,” she said, carefully.

“He won’t make it. The medics say his wounds are too serious, and he’ll die within the hour. Internal bleeding, punctured lungs and liver, broken ribs, bad concussion – you name it. He’s in shock. He probably didn’t even intend to live this long – there was a second bomb that didn’t go off, one would have blown a hole right through the hull, killing everyone onboard.”

The cop’s words were too horrible to sink in.

“What about medical facilities on Mars?” Crystal asked, desperate. “They’re much closer.”

“He won’t make it. The paramedics say if we try to transport him, he’ll die even quicker.”

She knew what he was asking her, and didn’t like it. This wasn’t a Colby Cross vid – there would be real consequences to her choices. “Sir, there’s no telling what will happen if I scan him. What you’re asking is dangerous – if I don’t break off soon enough, I could die with him. It’s happened to telepaths before-”

He interrupted. “Ms. Bonville, we need to find out who was behind this attack, who he’s working with, how this was planned and funded. This man is the only one who knows that. We need this information, and we have no time to waste.”

“Officer, Psi Corps has protocols for situations like these. I’m not rated for necroscans.” It wasn’t entirely true – her rating wasn’t relevant – but Crystal gambled that the mundane cop wouldn’t know anything about Psi Corps regulations, or telepath ratings.

“You’re, what, a P5? You’re telling me a P5 can’t do necroscans? That’s absurd, I’ve seen it done.”

She was actually a P6, but telling him so wouldn't help.

“No sir, I’m saying that the Corps has protocols. We maintain a list of telepaths who have volunteered for that work. The Corps can’t force anyone to do one. It is very dangerous, as I said-”

“We don’t have time,” the cop barked. “Even if we call the Corps right now, it may be hours before they can get someone out here.”

She tried another angle. “Sir, if you think this man was behind the attack, then he has due process rights. It would be a violation of Psi Corps regulations to scan him without his consent. And you know that anything I find in his mind will be inadmissible in court…”

Unfortunately, that tactic didn’t work, either. “Ms. Bonville, I’m sorry to ask you to do this,” the cop lied. “I don’t have the authority to demand it of you, because you’re not security personnel – you’re with Psi Corps, assigned to the company. But someone just killed your boss and over a dozen of your coworkers. All the other telepaths are dead. Our only suspect is dying. We need to conduct a terrorist investigation, and right now you’re our only chance.”

A medic interrupted. “We don’t have much time,” she said, looking up from her position crouched over the unconscious man. “He’s going into cardiac arrest.”

The cop’s eyes met Crystal’s. “Our suspect is dying, Ms. Bonville. It’s now or never!”

Crystal hesitated. She thought about Mariska. She thought about her mother. _Oh my God, I’m going to end up like my mother._

There was no escape. She was on a spaceship. She had nowhere to run.

“This is it,” the cop said forcefully, disdainfully. “What’s wrong with you? Do you support the underground?”

“No! Of course not!”

“Then you gonna help us or not?”

It wasn’t a real choice.

Crystal felt screaming in her mind, from passengers in the transport all around her. Everyone was barking orders, everyone was in pain. She smelled blood and smoke, felt the thud of her heart beating wildly in her chest.

“Now!” the cop was screaming. “Didn’t you hear me? I said now!”

Against her better judgment, Crystal knelt down and took off one of her gloves and touched the dying man’s face. All she had to do was look into his mind, and she was sucked downward.

She’d heard stories, but none of the descriptions came close to the thing itself. There was a tunnel, there was a gateway – at first far off, but moving closer, faster. Time and space became distorted, changed… and she stood by as he was pulled beyond the gateway, while she remained outside.

A part of her went with him.

When the door closed and she found herself kneeling on the floor of the ship, she saw, as if from far away, that she was shaking. She felt numb. Her cheeks were wet. She felt at least a decade older.

“Well?” the mundane police officer was asking from behind her, over her shoulder. He seemed as far away as Earth itself.

Her voice cracked. “His name is Malcolm Blackburn. He used to work for this company, in the Mars office. He… hates the company for a variety of personal reasons. He was laid off some years back… He sympathizes with the underground, but he’s not with them. He’s a lone wolf.”

_Damn planet of war._

The cop swore, and turned and started talking with some other normals about completely different things. Crystal had served her purpose, and no longer mattered. The medics ignored her, too, as they attended to the severely physically injured.

She put her glove back on. She felt cold, empty, disposable. She sat staring at Blackburn’s body until they forced her to move.


	2. Chapter 2

Crystal’s mother was a court telepath.

As a child, Crystal didn’t understand the normal judicial process – all she knew was that bad normals went to court before they went to prison for the bad things they’d done. In the Corps, when something bad happened, Psi Cops just scanned everyone, found out who did it, and punished the guilty. In the normal world, people had to go through something called a “trial” instead.

Crystal’s parents would come to visit her on special occasions and holidays, and over the occasional weekend, though since they were divorced, they did not always visit at the same time. By the time Crystal was eleven, her mother’s behavior had taken a turn for the worse. Crystal didn’t know why.

Sometimes Simone seemed nervous, distracted, agitated, or lost her temper over small things. On Birthday one year, she showed up drunk to the festivities, and the teachers had to escort her off campus. Crystal was humiliated. Her mother was an embarrassment to the Corps.

“Alcohol lowers inhibitions, and people sometimes do very foolish things when they drink,” Teacher Burns had told the children. “Sometimes, people make bad decisions and hurt themselves, or others. They misjudge risk, they open themselves up for trouble. When you graduate and go out into the world, remember that in everything you say and do, you are representatives of the Corps. If you drink in excess and do foolish or dangerous things, you bring shame to the Corps.”

Crystal wished her mother would not come to visit her at all if the alternative was an embarrassment.

Her mother continued to visit, although the problems didn’t stop. On time, Simone managed to get Crystal alone, away from her cadre and teachers. Crystal smelled alcohol on her breath again.

“The Corps doesn’t need lazy telepaths!” her mother shouted, in reference to Crystal’s latest grades. “You spend too much time playing, and watching vids, and too little time studying! Do you really think you’re going to graduate with grades like this? The Corps will kick you out! You’ll be out on the street with mundane trash!”

The teachers would sometimes make similar threats, though always in vague terms. They threatened that if she didn’t work harder, she wouldn‘t pass the entrance exams for the Minor Academy, though where she’d supposedly end up was never specified. She didn’t know of anyone who had actually been kicked out of the Corps, but the threat scared her nonetheless.

“You’re a disgrace!” Simone shouted. “What have your teachers taught you about laziness?”

“Lazy telepaths are selfish, we let down the Corps,” she said obediently, reciting one of the many maxims students memorized about good conduct. “Hard work makes the Corps strong.”

“That’s right!” Her mother continued to berate her for several more minutes. “The next time I come back to see you,” she finally threatened, “your grades had better improve, or else!”

“Or else what?” Crystal asked, angry.

“Or else I’ll whup your sorry little ass to Proxima 3!”

Crystal saw other students approaching, younger students from a different cadre. She couldn’t let them see her humiliated by her mother – she had to be a role model.

“Wrong!” Crystal shouted back, tears welling up in her eyes. “You’re not the Corps, you have no right to discipline me! Only the Corps can do that, they’re Mother and Father, not you! You’re the embarrassment here, showing up drunk, and causing a scene!”

Her mother was stunned; in the moment it took her to figure out what had just happened and how to respond, Crystal turned and ran back to her cadre. She only wanted to hide and cry.

*****

Crystal did her best to improve her grades, afraid she wouldn’t get a good job after graduation if she didn’t. Students began to get tracked for their future careers in the Minor Academy.

No matter how hard she worked, there was no way to know exactly where she’d end up – she hadn’t developed telepathy yet. What career she would be groomed for in the Minor and Major Academy would depend on her psi rating; regardless of grades, some jobs were only open to telepaths who were strong enough. No one under high P11 could be a Psi Cop. Bloodhounds - telepaths in special ops - were all highly rated, at least P8, but usually above. Telepaths trained in search and recovery were also typically very strong, since they would need to be able to sort for individual minds, even at a distance, without line of sight. Most telepaths ended up commercial, working in the normal courts, or else got jobs within the Corps itself. Professional jobs were hard to get – doctors, nurses, lawyers, scientists, and, of course, teachers.

Soon after Crystal began to develop telepathy, her mother came again to visit, her first in many months.

Crystal hoped Simone had finally got help. She knew the Corps had counselors to help telepaths with emotional issues (and drinking problems), and she hoped her mother was trusting the Corps and getting that help. That her mother was sober this time was an encouraging start.

“The tests show I’m going to be a P6,” Crystal said. “Teacher Burns says I should be commercial.” They walked through the campus in the evening air. “He says if I study hard and keep my grades up, I can stay in the city and work for a big company.” She knew her mother would approve – Crystal’s grades were higher now, and her mother wanted her to work for a prestigious company with a solid professional reputation. Freelancing was a much harder lifestyle – steady work was hard to get, and freelance telepaths were more likely to be attacked on the job. Not everyone who hired a freelance telepath had honest intentions.

Crystal could feel a heaviness in her mother. They walked together to a set of benches in front of one of the academic buildings, part of the Minor Academy. Everyone was spending their recreation time elsewhere. They were alone.

Her mother said nothing.

Crystal didn’t like to be alone, away from her cadre – she remembered the last time her mother had got her alone. Besides, in only a few weeks, her cadre would be graduating, getting their gloves, and moving into the dorms of the Minor Academy with students from all the other cadres. These were their last weeks together – she wanted to spend time with her mother, but not away from everyone else. That wasn’t right. And her mother wasn’t even saying anything at all.

“Doesn’t it matter to you?” Crystal asked. “Isn’t this what you wanted? Don’t you care?”

Her mother sat down on a bench. To Crystal’s shock, she removed her gloves.

Crystal began to panic, afraid for her mother’s mental health. “Mom, don’t do that, you’re outside! You’re embarrassing me. If the teachers see you-”

Crystal’s mother just motioned for her to sit down beside her. Then she took her hand.

“I failed you,” she said. “My work took more from me than it ever should have. I’m sorry.”

Crystal didn’t know what to say. She was angry. She was hurt. She looked around, hoped no one would see her mother’s bare hands.

“I’ve let everyone down,” she said. “You, your father, the Corps. I can’t undo that. But I think you should at least know why.”

“Just put your gloves back on,” Crystal said. Her mother didn’t.

“What you’ve been taught in vids about the courts… There’s a lot they didn’t tell you. I’ve seen normals get away with murder.”

Everyone knew that normals were violent to telepaths, and telepaths had to be very careful around them. “I know that,” she said. “That’s why the campus has high walls. That’s why we have Psi Cops to protect us.”

“No Crystal, I mean the Psi Cops catch the criminals, and send them to court, and they get away with it anyway.”

“But how? They’ve been caught.” At school, punishment was always fair. No one ever got punished for something they didn’t do, and no one who broke school rules ever got away with it. Crystal couldn’t imagine that even with their “trial” system, normals could let each other get away with murder.

“Telepaths are not allowed to be attorneys or judges. We're not allowed to sit on juries. When they’ve killed a telepath, mundanes lie and say they didn’t do it, that it wasn’t them. They usually get away with it.”

“Why can’t you scan them? Then everyone would know.”

“I can’t – those are the rules.”

Crystal felt cold; it was a crisp day for late spring. Her mother took hold of her hand, tightly. In the distance, some of the older Minor Academy students were returning from sports, wearing their gold and umber tracksuits and windbreakers. Crystal could hear them talking, joking, could see them smiling. She wanted to return to her cadre, but she didn’t dare let go of her mother’s hand. She hoped the older students wouldn’t notice them.

Her mother began to cry. Crystal felt very uncomfortable; she didn’t like touching someone who was crying, it made her feel all squirmy inside. She could feel her mother didn’t care, though – or maybe she wanted Crystal to feel squirmy.

“One day the call came from the Corps, and they asked me to go down to the medical center and scan a telepath teen who wasn’t going to make it, to help find her killer. I went; it was my duty. Then the court got word of it and put me on the volunteer list for necroscans. I did three more, the most I could be called to do. Each time, my recovery took longer. Each time, it took a piece of me that never came back.”

Crystal nodded.

“I started to break. I relived the attacks I’d seen in my court scans of victims and witnesses – flashbacks, nightmares, senseless brutality. The Corps paid me the standard rate increases, but what’s a ten percent raise when the price is your sanity? I woke up each night crying, shaking, sweating. I started drinking more, if only so I wouldn’t keep seeing the blood, feeling the pain, hearing the screams. Nowhere was safe for me anymore, Crystal, nowhere. This was the price of justice.

“The Corps told me to see a counselor, to let someone into my mind to help set things right. They warned me that I was unstable, and might lose my job if I didn’t pull together. It’s happened to telepaths before. But I refused.”

Crystal didn’t understand. In school she’d always been taught that telepaths who need help should trust the Corps to provide it. Her mother’s behavior seemed very selfish.

“I didn’t want anyone else to see what I had seen,” her mother said. “I only wanted to be numb, Crystal, to drown the demons of other people.”

Holding her mother’s ungloved hand, Crystal felt the echo of the flashbacks her mother endured.

“And I wondered,” her mother was saying, “why did I do all those scans? Because I couldn’t say no? What was justice, anyway? Justice for whom?”


	3. Chapter 3

Crystal was sixteen when her mother overdosed. Simone Bonville hadn’t died dramatically, like [William Karges](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10382478). She’d instead died slowly, bit by bit, year after year.

Crystal stood with her father at the funeral, crying, and clung to the pieces of her mother she still had, tucked away in her mind. Crystal had done her best to dress presentably, sharply even, to tie her hair neatly back, to wear crisp new gloves without wrinkles – but she knew she still looked awful, her eyes red and puffy from sobbing. Her once impeccable makeup now smudged a pile of tissues.

She half-listened to the prayers in the chapel, straining to keep her mind off the background thoughts of her mom’s friends and colleagues. Funerals were an awful custom, she decided – putting everyone together in the same small space till their mental shields neared the breaking point under the crushing weight of others’ emotions. Despite the efforts of many to maintain boundaries, the pain in the room nonetheless took on a kind of echo, exponentially magnified by the close quarters and intense feelings. Even some of the most skillful and trained telepaths had a tendency to bloop like small children at funerals.

She had wanted to be angry at her mother, but all she could do was cry, especially since it seemed half her mom’s friends were blaming themselves for her mother’s death. Most had lots touch with her after graduation, and the others had only seen her infrequently. Their guilt made no sense, logically – Simone had refused all of their offers for help, just as she had refused to see a counselor – but they felt they should have been there for her anyway, and been able to do the impossible. Only Crystal’s father felt out of place at the funeral service – their marriage had been arranged by the Corps, one undertaken out of duty, ending in divorce two years and one daughter later when they realized they couldn’t make it work. He had come to the funeral for Crystal’s sake, not her mother’s.

The preacher, a low-rated telepath raised outside the Corps, began to talk about the afterlife, the immortality of the human soul. Crystal wasn’t quite sure what she herself believed about life after death, but she knew she carried some of her mother’s memories, including indirect fragments of people her mother had scanned, the victims and witnesses in criminal trials. She’d known that for years; sometimes, watching crime vids gave her flashbacks, but no matter how painful, she didn’t want to lose the pieces, any of them. Somehow, she knew it was her duty to carry them. They were all she had left of her mother.

Perhaps, she realized, that to be a telepath was to brush against immortality. Though Simone had passed on, neither was she entirely dead; with every breath, Crystal carried some part of her, and perhaps some day could give meaning to her mother’s pain and sacrifice. She looked around the chapel again, at the defiant glittering of psi badges in the bright light, and realized that perhaps there was some sense to the emotional cacophony of funerals after all, for it showed her in stark terms that no telepath was ever truly alone; each bore witness to one another, in a way not even death could erase. Under all the careful training, and meticulous maintenance of boundaries – under the gloves – lay a deeper fluidity to human consciousness that only they could feel, a fluidity both terrifying and profound.

She made eye contact. People nodded back, solemnly.

_You understand now_ , they said.

And for brief a moment, Crystal felt buoyed up, and had no fear, for she could see, in the eyes and hearts and minds of the others in the chapel, that some day, the same community would also remember her, as she remembered her mother. She was a telepath, part of a family ten million strong – the Corps was her real Mother and Father. Her life would never be forgotten, meaningless. Such was her inheritance, her birthright.

*****

Back home on Earth, Crystal stared out the window of her apartment. Her husband had brought her food to eat, but it sat on a tray on the bed, cold.

She wondered why she’d scanned Malcolm Blackburn. What could the mundane cop have done to her if she’d refused? Yelled? Called her names? He had no legal authority to order her to scan anyone at all, let alone a dying man.

But she’d done it.

Why?

Why had her mother done it? Why did Mariska do it in the vids?

The abuse had gradually crept up on her, day after day, year after year, as normals ordered her to do them favors, with fake apologies for the inconvenience and never so much as a “please” or “thank you.” She could never tell them no – good telepaths never said no. Such words meant nothing – normals knew they only had to push harder, and a “good telepath” would always give in.

She looked down at her hands in her lap. If someone had asked her to slice off a finger, like any reasonable person, she’d refuse.

Day after day, year after year… It started small. Eventually, they’d demand you slice off a finger, and you would.

_You don’t really need all ten of them, now do you? It’s just one finger… you don’t really need it, not like we need the results of this scan._

What part of her was she missing now that she’d scanned that man? How much of her would never come back?

When people are never allowed to say no, she realized, then eventually, it becomes impossible to do so.

Crystal’s husband put their young son Hiroto to bed, and brought her another plate of food. She hadn’t touched the first.

“I’m worried about you, Crystal,” he said.

She looked down at the food, then went back to staring out the window. It was dark outside, except for the city lights, but she didn’t mind. She liked the darkness. It felt like home. “I’m not hungry,” she said.

“You haven’t left the apartment in days,” he said.

“I’m not going back to that company. I’m done with giving them pieces of myself.”

_I know, you’ve said all this before._ “Maybe you can work for the Corps instead.”

Crystal thought for a long moment. “Is that where all the broken goods go, the telepaths who are thrown away?”

“I didn’t say-”

“What’s the point?” she cut him off. “I’ll live another fifty or sixty years and then they can throw me away for good.”

“Don’t talk like that! I’ve read that the prognosis is very manageable for telepaths who’ve done only one deathbed scan. You’re not the only telepath to go through this. Those who fare the worst are those who refuse treatment.” He paused. "It’s never going to be the same as it was, but that doesn’t mean you have to throw everything away. I need you. Hiroto needs you.”

Crystal doubted she could be that person again, the one they needed. “I also survived a terrorist attack. I saw the mutilated bodies of my friends and colleagues. Everyone around me was convinced they were about to die. Do you what that does to people’s minds, even normals’?”

He didn’t, not directly. She felt him acknowledge that, though he didn’t say a word aloud.

She broke down crying. She thought about the pieces of her mother that she still carried, horrors and fragments of trauma from her mother’s time in the courts, now embedded in Crystal’s mind like shrapnel. Such was the price of immortality; every telepath eventually carried something too horrible for words.

“She tried to warn me. She tried to warn me and I didn’t listen.” Crystal turned to look at him, into his dark eyes. “You have no idea what I’ve seen. There’s a hole in me where something used to be, and I don’t even remember what. I can’t let anyone in my mind after what I’ve seen. Even you.”

“Crystal, please listen. Malcolm Blackburn is dead. You’re not. If you’d done four deathbed scans, like your mother, things would be very different. But you didn’t.”

Was Blackburn really dead, she wondered? And was she really alive?

“Why, Mark? Why do some people do so many of these scans?”

“I don’t know.”

But Crystal did know. She thought about her mother’s drinking, about the drugs she had started taking soon after that fateful visit at school. As a child, she’d thought her mother’s behavior was selfish, incomprehensible even, but now it began to make sense. Her mother hadn’t wanted to look at those memories, or for anyone else to look at them, either. She’d wanted them to die, like the people to whom they had once belonged. She didn’t want to face the horrors, to try to make sense of them, to open herself to examination and vulnerability. She’d wanted the memories to die and leave her in peace.

There were rumors in the Corps that the famed Psi Cop Mr. Bester had done eight deathbed scans, more than anyone, ever. According to the story, he’d refused a diagnostic scan after being fugued in the famous Black Fox raid of 2222, and losing use of his left hand. He’d started doing deathbed scans. One, two… eight.

What had he seen on that raid? What could be so horrible that he would subject himself to eight necroscans to kill it?

No one would ever know.

“I know why they do these scans,” she said, her voice distant in her ears. “They want to be numb. That’s how they cope with the pain, to kill themselves bit by little bit till they’re empty inside, till they can’t feel anything at all. Alcohol and drugs wear off, but necroscans are permanent.” She thought of the time her mother came to school drunk, and how embarrassed she’d felt at her mother’s conduct. “And this way, there’s no shame to the Corps. Sacrifice… isn’t sacrifice for the Corps noble, Mark?”

“Yes, but surely there are less dangerous ways-”

“Maybe they convince themselves they’re helping someone. They're helping mundanes, they're helping the Corps. They’re helping the police find murderers. They’re helping the dead find justice." She paused. "Or maybe they’re are looking for something beyond the gateway to the next world, or running from something in this one: from their own pain, from others’ pain, or from something that terrifies them even more than either.”

Crystal and stared out the window into the darkness. Did her mother have any justice? Her coworkers? She’d played her part, she’d made her sacrifice, but justice remained elusive.


End file.
